Development of fan-shaped tracker for single particle tracking

With the development of super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, complex dynamic processes in living cells can be observed and recorded with unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution. Single particle tracking (SPT) is the most important step to explore the relationship between the spatio-temporal dynamics of subcellular molecules and their functions. Although previous studies have developed SPT algorithms to quantitatively analyze particle dynamics in cell, traditional tracking methods have poor performance when dealing with intersecting trajectories. This can be attributed to two main reasons: (a) they do not have point compensation process for overlapping objects; (b) they use inefficient motion prediction models. In this paper, we present a novel fan-shaped tracker (FsT) algorithm to reconstruct the trajectories of subcellular vesicles in living cells. We proposed a customized point compensation method for overlapping objects based on the fan-shaped motion trend of the particles. Furthermore, we validated the performance of the FsT in both simulated time-lapse movies with variable imaging quality and in real vesicle moving images. Meanwhile, we compared the performance of FsT with other five state-of-the-art tracking algorithms by using commonly defined measures. The results showed that our FsT achieves better performance in high signal-to-noise ratio conditions and in tracking of overlapping objects. We anticipate that our FsT method will have vast applications in tracking of moving objects in cell.